Agriculture conquers the desert
p. 114-115
Texte intégral
| 1/3 | 8,400,000 tons | 1,500,000 hectares | 4% of national territory |
| Share of cultivated land in winter under wheat | Wheat production in 2017 | Reclaimed land | Agricultural land |
| Sources: CAPMAS; FAO; MAAF, 2015 | |||
1Given the very reduced surface area of workable farmland, Egypt’s agricultural policies since the 1950s have regularly featured expansion projects into the desert margins on either side of the Nile, in the oases and on the Sinai Peninsula. The greening of the desert has become a national imperative, made possible by the inauguration of the Aswan High Dam (1971) and by technical progress in irrigation. For almost 70 years land reclamation programmes for agricultural purposes have been at the heart of various strategies adopted by successive presidents as a means to justifying their actions, satisfying political support and responding to development aims for the supply of basic foodstuffs (wheat, pulse crops and sugar).
2Since the end of the 1980s the State has turned increasingly to private investors while contributing largely to the financing of the necessary infrastructure: the fellahs* on the “old” lands have, on the contrary, witnessed a significant disengagement of State institutions.
Justifying desert reclamation
3Getting out of the Nile Valley and Delta because of geographic and demographic restrictions, along with the accompanying evils of fragmented land ownership, pollution, urban extension and sprawl onto agricultural lands. This argument is constantly repeated in land reclamation programmes, and as such it expresses a desire to modernise the country and transform the desert into the construction site of a New Egypt.
4In the 1950s the Nasserite promise was of a country built on “virgin” lands ensuring the development of a new society. In the mid-1980s the occupation of the new agricultural land went hand in hand with a campaign promoting the cultivation of export crops with high added value (fruits, vegetables, and flowers). The anticipated success of launching these products into a demanding market was based upon the unspoilt nature of the land, the possibility of growing on large surface areas, mechanisation, and the application high-performance technologies. This policy, which encouraged private investment, continued under Mubarak during the 1990s with the controversial and unfinished megaproject of Toshka. The two decades from 1990 to 2010 witnessed the development of large farms covering several hundreds, if not thousands of feddans* on the edges of the desert. Young university graduates and landless peasants set themselves up on marginal land, where the government’s allocation of plots fulfilled the role of a safety valve when social pressure built up too high.
6.19 New land either reclaimed or under improvement during the 2010s

6.20 Proposed Toshka development zone

Production on desert land
5While agricultural improvement programmes have met mixed success, often missing initial targets, the conquest of desert lands is a reality that has transformed the landscape and delivered products. Since the 1990s the desert has become home to an agricultural sector dominated by a class of grand private entrepreneurs, while at the same time being shaped by small farmers installed within government boundaries on the western margins of the Delta. A small business elite has benefitted from the bonanza on offer – that is, very cheap desert lands with free access to irrigation water. Major Egyptian entrepreneurs (including the Talaat, Diab and Maghrabi families) and foreign investors, often from the Gulf (such as the Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, whose estate has since been sold back to the Egyptian army), have become specialised in products intended for export or agro-industrial processing. Thus, durum wheat from Toshka is processed in pasta factories in the north of the country, while table grapes from the Delta are exported to Europe.
6.21 Wheat growing at Toshka, 2015

© Delphine Acloque
6.22 Table grape vines on the western edge of the Delta, 2013

© Delphine Acloque
Reclaiming 1.5 million feddans
6President Sisi decided in 2014 to relaunch the Toshka project, integrating it into a development programme involving 1.5 million feddans in the Western Desert. The initiative is built upon the use of water from underground sources and Lake Nasser. It revives the notion of a “development corridor”, which was first expressed in the 1980s by the engineer Farouk el-Baz under the title “New Valley”, and was later abandoned.
7Agricultural investment in the extreme south of the country is tangled up with geopolitical issues and features a strong involvement by the army, and Emirati and Saudi funding in Toshka and Sharq el-Oweinat. The ongoing reclamation project also has major environmental implications due to the exploitation of water resources that are in part non-renewable.
Auteur
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Delphine Acloque Desmulier
Delphine Acloque Desmulier, PhD and lecturer in geography, University Paris Nanterre, grant holder at the CEDEJ from 2013 to 2015
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